With increasing population and the consumption of land suitable for land-fill sites, garbage collection and distribution has become a serious global problem. At the same time, concern for the environment has prompted widescale recycling and regulations to control disposal practices, such as unchecked offshore dumping. All of these concerns are causing trash pick-up and waste management to be a much more sophisticated process than it once was, requiring much more control over what is being discarded and where it is being put.
To ensure that household refuse is disposed of properly, additional personnel are required and, in many cases, the refuse must be hauled greater and greater distances as land-fills are consumed. This means that trash collection has become, and will continue to become, increasingly expensive. One technique used to allocate the expenses associated with rubbish removal is to collect these materials on the basis of weight, and to charge customers accordingly.
Clearly trash must be weighed when it is first collected since it loses its identifiable nature when commingled. Of course, various scales are available which may be used in conjunction with curbside collection, but sophisticated electronic, and even mechanical scales prevent difficulties, both in terms of affordability and in terms of maintenance. Additionally, at least for the time being, extremely precise weight measurements are not required and approximations, for example to the nearest five pounds, may be sufficient. As such, complex scales are not yet required.
Thus, there remains a need for an economical but sufficiently accurate means of weighing receptacles, such as the plastic bags ordinarily employed for trash collection purposes. An ideal device would be sufficiently accurate but passive in the sense that intricate mechanical mechanisms or electronic sensors are not required. With a sufficiently economical device, the burden of procuring the scale could be shifted to the garbage source as opposed to the garbage collector, thereby relieving an already challenged system of yet another requirement which may need to be implemented on a wide scale.